All Our Yesterdays 31: Spaceship by Harry Warner Jr. talks about the very young Robert Silverberg from Brooklyn and his  Spaceship fanzine he started 3 December 1949. In the very first issue above, he's very happily outing people's real identities under pen names One of them was L. Ron Hubbard.

This little fanzine newsletter was one of the first outlets to demonize Hubbard and Dianetics in Spaceship #9, July 1950. Page 12 carries an attack story disguised as fiction by with Saul Diskin called "Cancelled, a dianetic fantasy" detailing a story about Thomas Portune, Dianetic Auditor who audits Dudley Farnham (who has shooting pains in his stomach). During this "session" Saul makes it look like Dianetics is doing straight hypnotism, installing a "canceller". The "incident" run is Dudley's having read a Superman story. The session is interrupted, meanwhile Dudley is mumbling about being Superman, jumps out a 3 story window landing standing without injury, with the auditor screaming out the window "Cancelled! Cancelled!".

The derogatory sidewise attack on Superman comics, is practically a verbatim black propaganda idea along the lines of what Dr. Wertham was saying about Superman comics, about how they gave people delusions of power and such and how DANGEROUS that is. So, with this ridiculously out of time and place story by a 17-year-old Saul Diskin (the first major media attack, the Rollo May New York Times article hadn't even come out yet) makes no sense, unless you know that Wertham was actually the first person to attack Hubbard, just a few days earlier a Book fair.

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews